FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT RUSSIAN REVOLUTION - PAGE 4

Usually even in this confused "modern" century, major events announce themselves with hymns, heraldry or hope. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a scream from the Russian soul. The American Depression of 1929 was notably punctured by the moans and cries of human pain. Even the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, although far from the explosion of 1917, had its moment of formal announcement in Moscow. But today, great seismic changes in history eschew such convenient notices.

By Alan Cheuse. Alan Cheuse is a commentator for NPR and author of the short-story collection "Lost and Old Rivers." | February 21, 1999

NOVEMBER 1916: The Red Wheel/Knot II By Alexander Solzhenitsyn, translated by H.T. Willetts Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1014 pages, $35 November 1916--not a period of time that stands out in historical memory. In fact, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn announces in the author's note to this huge second installment (or "knot," as he calls them) of his grand fictional opus, "The Red Wheel," this period "encapsulates the stagnant and oppressive atmosphere of the months immediately preceding" the Russian Revolution.

Although they lived and worked in one of the most impoverished, backward and strife-torn nations of the world, they were architects as visionary as Frank Lloyd Wright and as radical as Mies van der Rohe. Had they been allowed to flourish, had they come to maturity in a different time, country and political system, their designs might have changed the course of world architecture. As it was, their influence was felt throughout Europe between the wars and in the Modernist architectural Renaissance experienced by the post-World War II United States.

The first brush strokes have been applied in an effort to restore the House of Faberge, whose artisans produced exquisite jewelry and other priceless objects of czarist conceit, as a museum, workshop, conference center and, eventually, salesroom. The original House of Faberge is a four-story, double-winged townhouse in the heart of old St. Petersburg, a short walk from the Hermitage museum and Winter Palace, site of the 1917 Bolshevik coup. Nobody expects a full revival of the Faberge tradition.

By William Pfaff, (copyright) 1989, Los Angeles Times Syndicate | July 28, 1989

A principal lesson of the French Revolution 200 years ago, as of the Russian Revolution in this century, is that no one controls a revolution. The actual events of a revolution take place only after the inner revolution is already irreversible. That inner revolution has now probably occurred in Soviet society. Mikhail Gorbachev gives evidence of this by running faster and faster to stay ahead of events he cannot control. He must follow the striking Siberian and Ukrainian miners, and the nationalist protesters-he is their leader.

"Snow," in its premiere at Pegasus Players, is a most impressive production and a brave and ambitious piece of writing-though it is far from a perfect play. With this new work, the young Chicago writer John Logan has expanded his style of narrative scenario from the specific criminal cases of his two earlier plays-"Never the Sinner," about the Leopold-Loeb trial, and "Hauptmann," about the convicted Lindbergh baby kidnaper-to one of the great dramas of the 20th Century, the Russian Revolution.

When Vladimir Ilyich Lenin died in January 1924, the outpouring of grief among the people of this country was such that the government briefly flirted with the idea of changing the name of Sunday to Leninday. Though the days of the week remained unchanged, buildings, libraries, schools, factories and farms were renamed to honor the man who led the Russian Revolution. Everything from stadiums to ships was given the name Lenin. Parents even began calling their baby boys Vladilen and their girls Vladilena.

Walk into the Steppenwolf Upstairs Theatre, and the ghostly white-lace universe enveloping you imparts a feeling that the Tina Landau staging of Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" is going to be something special. The production turns out to be special now and then, in brief, discrete moments. Director Landau set an awfully high bar for herself two years ago with "The Time of Your Life." Here, with an infinitely richer and more elusive play, you must settle for a generally absorbing account of a 100-year-old dream, with occasional flashes of magic.

I have a century-old image of the Russian city of St. Petersburg given me by my late grandmother Caroline, whose father, in the days before the Russian Revolution, was an education official of some minor sort in the imperial government of Czar Nicholas II. She recalled riding through St. Petersburg one bright, crisply-cold winter's afternoon with her father in a three-horse sleigh, or troika. They were proceeding along Nevsky Prospekt or some other major thoroughfare when, crossing an intersection in the approaching sunset, she caught sight of a long file of Cossack cavalry riding along on a parallel street.

- About the only difficulty I've encountered here, wandering alone, far from the official Winter Olympics staging grounds, has been my inability to speak Russian. Still, I'm able to communicate somewhat effectively, as I often do at home with our earthier elected officials, through use of broad pantomime, exaggerated facial expressions and voice inflection. And every so often here in Russia, I find someone who speaks a bit of English. Then I confuse them by speaking Chicago.